The opportunity to personalize features in a mobile vehicle is ever increasing as the automobile is being transformed into a communications and entertainment platform as well as a transportation platform. Many new American cars are installed with some type of telematics unit to provide wireless communication and location-based services. These services are accessible through interfaces such as voice-recognition computer applications, touch-screen computer displays, computer keyboards, or a series of buttons on the dashboard or console of a vehicle.
Currently, telematics service call centers, in-vehicle compact disk (CD) or digital video display (DVD) media, web portals, and voice-enabled phone portals provide various types of location services, including driving directions, stolen vehicle tracking, traffic information, weather reports, restaurant guides, ski reports, road condition information, accident updates, street routing, landmark guides, and business finders.
It is desirable to use telematics services described above to identify and track vehicles, such as cars, trucks and vans, as they are moved between holding lots and/or dealership lots. In particular, automatic tracking of a vehicle when a vehicle is one of several being transported from a factory to a dealership would improve asset monitoring for a dealership or factory.